Manchester City and the Great English Football Morality Show


City have been found to have broken the Premier League's financial rules on an extraordinary scale. That deserves consequences. But before English football starts polishing its halo, perhaps we should ask who designed this system, who it protects and why.


PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT CONTENT
The following article contains strong language, financial regulation, sovereign wealth, American billionaires, moral hypocrisy, Richard Masters and an alarming number of lawyers.
Some readers may find the lawyers particularly distressing.


The strongest swear words have been partially censored because apparently that is where civilisation draws the line.
Let's start with what we actually know.
Manchester City have been found by an independent commission to have committed extraordinarily serious breaches of the Premier League's financial rules over a nine-season period between 2009-10 and 2017-18.
These aren't minor accounting discrepancies.
The commission found that City arranged what it described as "sham" contracts with commercial partners, misstated accounts and concealed the true state of the club's finances from auditors and football regulators.
According to the Premier League, the schemes artificially inflated City's revenues and reduced its costs by more than £900million in order to make the club appear compliant with financial rules. The commission also upheld the majority of charges concerning City's failure to cooperate with the league's investigation.
Those are enormous findings.
City reject them.
Chief executive Ferran Soriano says the case rests upon a false central proposition concerning the source of commercial funding and argues that evidence provided by City demonstrates that. The club maintains its innocence and intends to appeal.
That matters.
Because despite some of the celebrations elsewhere, this isn't finished.
There is no points deduction as yet.
Manchester City haven't been relegated.
They haven't been expelled from the Premier League.
Nobody has removed a title.
Nobody has driven round to Sergio Agüero's house and asked him to return his medal.
The Premier League rules provide an appeal process and, although the eventual possibilities include fines, points deductions, suspension and ultimately expulsion, the sanction stage remains unresolved. The extraordinary history of this case also makes anyone offering a confident date for the final full stop rather brave.
And there is another distinction worth making before everybody starts throwing furniture.
If these findings ultimately survive City's challenges, this wasn't merely a club spending £20million too much because somebody put the Champions League catering bill in the wrong column.
The commission's finding is that financial arrangements were deliberately misrepresented to circumvent rules under which everybody else was expected to operate.
That's serious.
You enter a competition.
You agree to its rules.
You don't then get to secretly decide the inconvenient ones are optional.
There should be consequences.
There.
That was the easy bit.
Now can we talk about the f***ing rules?
Because English football has spent the past few days experiencing one of the most spectacular outbreaks of moral purity since they started putting stained glass in York Minster.
Everyone is appalled.
Everyone has apparently always cared passionately about financial probity.
Everyone else's owners are lovely.
Former players have scaled the nearest available hillock to announce which trophies should be returned, which medals belong in bins and roughly how many lashes Manchester City should receive before breakfast.
English football has discovered the moral high ground.
There's barely room to swing a cat up there.
The Brian Clough clip from The Damned United has inevitably been doing the rounds.
You know the one.
The medals. The caps. The pots. The pans. The biggest dustbin you can find. All won by cheating.
Magnificent.
It's also a dramatisation of something Clough said to Leeds United in 1974.
Which is useful.
Because apparently, we're now supposed to believe that English football before Abu Dhabi consisted entirely of honest local businessmen in sheepskin coats, smoking Embassy No.1 over half a mild while Doris from accounts maintained immaculate double-entry bookkeeping upstairs.
No brown envelopes.
No illicit payments.
No creative accounting.
No questionable bonuses.
No directors quietly sorting something out over lunch.
Just good, honest British businessmen administering association football entirely for the benefit of the community.
Bollocks.
They were at it then too.
The numbers were just smaller.
Manchester City themselves were involved in an illegal-payments scandal in the early 20th century.
So perhaps the surprising thing isn't that football and money have produced another scandal.
It's that after well over a century of evidence, anybody can still look surprised.
None of which excuses Manchester City.
And that's the distinction on which this entire argument rests.
Manchester City can have broken the rules, but the rules can still be sh*t.
The two things aren't mutually exclusive.
Indeed, the latter question interests me rather more than deciding whether somebody should climb into a DeLorean and remove Agüero from the pitch at 93:19.
Because what exactly are English football's financial regulations trying to achieve?
Sustainability?
Excellent.
Competitive balance?
Also excellent.
But those aren't necessarily the same thing.
A financial system which substantially relates your spending capacity to the revenue you already generate has one fairly obvious characteristic.
It's absolutely bloody brilliant if you already generate loads of revenue.
Manchester United can spend like Manchester United because they're Manchester United.
Liverpool can spend like Liverpool because they're Liverpool.
Arsenal can spend like Arsenal because they're Arsenal.
Tottenham have constructed an enormous commercial operation and can enjoy the financial capacity that follows. Beyoncé, NFL games, boxing, go-karts, conference facilities, probably a christening package in the South Stand if you ask nicely.
Fine.
They've built it. They've earned it.
But here's the awkward question.
How does anybody else catch them?
Newcastle can increase revenue.
Villa can increase revenue.
Everton can increase revenue.
Wolves can increase revenue.
But while they're doing that, the clubs they're chasing don't have to sit quietly in a darkened room for 20 years waiting for them.
They're growing too.
They're qualifying for Europe.
They're accumulating global sponsorships.
They're monetising enormous international supporter bases.
And occasionally they're buying the best players from the clubs attempting to catch them.
It's a foot race in which everybody is technically allowed to win, but several competitors began 200 metres further up the track.
This is apparently fair because they earned their 200 metres before the current starting pistol was invented.
Which brings us to history.
For most of English football's existence, nobody appears to have informed it that the hierarchy was supposed to be permanent.
Clubs rose.
Clubs fell.
Cities became wealthy.
Industries disappeared.
Benefactors arrived.
Benefactors died.
Football's centres of power moved around the country.
Aston Villa won seven league championships.
Everton won nine.
Sunderland won six.
Newcastle won four.
Sheffield Wednesday won four.
Wolves won three and became one of the defining English clubs of the 1950s.
Huddersfield became the first English club to win three consecutive championships.
Preston North End were the original Invincibles.
Nottingham Forest won the European Cup.
Then won it again, presumably because the first one hadn't sufficiently annoyed everybody.
And then English football met satellite television.
BSB.
Sky.
The Premier League.
Global broadcasting.
Overseas rights.
International sponsorship.
Commercial departments.
Official tyre partners.
Official noodle partners.
Official cryptocurrency exchanges.
Presumably somebody somewhere is currently negotiating to become Manchester United's Official Southeast Asian Grout Partner.
The financial rocket took off.
And over the decades that followed, English football developed a regulatory ecosystem in which how much money a club already generates became increasingly important to how much it can spend.
Which is tremendously convenient if you happened to have a good seat when somebody lit the rocket.
Villa?
European champions. Seven titles.
Lovely.
F*** off.
Everton?
Nine championships.
F*** off.
Wolves?
Three titles. Giants of the 1950s.
F*** off.
Sunderland?
Six.
F*** off.
Newcastle?
Four titles, six FA Cups and generations of enormous support.
F*** off.
Sheffield Wednesday?
Four championships.
F*** off.
Huddersfield?
First three-in-a-row champions.
That's adorable.
F*** off.
Preston?
The original Invincibles.
Lovely story, Grandad. Grow your commercial revenue organically and come back in 30 years.
Maybe get Beyoncé in.
Deepdale's lovely in June.
Nottingham Forest?
Two European Cups?
Sorry Brian. You really should have developed an official Malaysian tractor-battery partnership while you had the chance.
I'm being deliberately ridiculous.
But the question isn't ridiculous at all.
At what precise moment did English football's financial hierarchy become deserving of preservation?
Why this one?
Why should the clubs which were commercially best placed around football's great television and globalisation explosion enjoy some particular historical claim over the next century?
If satellite television, worldwide merchandising and enormous international broadcast revenues had exploded during Wolves' great 1950s era, and Wolves had subsequently spent decades compounding that commercial advantage, would we now solemnly explain that Wolverhampton Wanderers had earned their £800million revenue base and Manchester United merely needed to grow organically?
History didn't stop.
The money just became enormous.
At which point, a brief cultural interlude seems appropriate.
THE FAIR PLAY WAY
The chairman's clean, the sponsor's sound, the lawyer's flown in from out of town. The books are straight, the numbers great, provided you were rich in exactly nineteen ninety-eight.
The badge is sacred, the debt is fine, that's on a different spreadsheet line. Aspire, compete, go win the race. But mind the gap. And know your place.
The money's clean, the morals grand, the lawyers charge you by the hand. Dream all you like. Reach for the sky. Just earn what we earn first. Bye-bye.
Thank you.
The Arts Council have asked me not to do that again.
Anyway.
The moral argument becomes even more entertaining once we start deciding which rich people are acceptable.
There are serious questions around sovereign wealth, state influence, human rights and ownership of football clubs.
Ask them.
We should.
But please spare me the idea that global football has somehow established a beautifully clean ethical perimeter around acceptable money.
Saudi ownership is morally objectionable.
Right.
What about sponsorship originating there?
What about an owner's other businesses making enormous sums there?
What about Gulf airlines?
State-linked commercial organisations?
Investment funds?
American billionaires?
Private equity?
Leveraged ownership?
At which particular junction on the journey from Riyadh to Old Trafford does a pound become morally British?
These things aren't all equivalent.
That's important.
Direct sovereign ownership isn't automatically the same thing as a private company doing business in that country. Sponsorship isn't ownership. Investment isn't necessarily control.
But that's precisely the point.
It's complicated.
So perhaps GOOD BILLIONAIRE / BAD BILLIONAIRE isn't quite a sophisticated enough regulatory framework for a multibillion-pound global industry.
Then there are the trophies.
Oh Christ.
How exactly are we planning to reconstruct those?
If City's financial arrangements allowed them to assemble better teams than they otherwise could have done under the rules, that potentially provided a sporting advantage.
Obviously.
That's why football clubs spend money on footballers.
But quantify it.
Go on.
How many points?
Three?
Eleven?
Twenty-seven?
Would City still have bought Agüero?
Would they have bought somebody cheaper who scored more?
Would another club have bought him?
Would that have changed another transfer?
Would Manchester United have approached the final weeks of 2011-12 differently?
Would another club have qualified for the Champions League?
Would that club then have received another £40million, bought two players, finished six places higher the following season and beaten somebody who was subsequently relegated by a point?
Congratulations.
You've invented footballing quantum mechanics.
Every alternative league table creates another alternative league table.
And sitting quietly in the corner, watching all this with the expression of a Labrador that has just discovered an unattended Sunday roast, is the legal profession.
Because this is a lawyer's dream.
Potential compensation claims are already part of the discussion around what follows if the findings ultimately stand. Lost league positions, European qualification and revenues could produce immensely complicated questions of causation.
Lost prize money.
Lost European revenue.
Lost sponsorship bonuses.
Lost commercial growth.
Lost transfer opportunities.
What about the player Club A would have bought with its Champions League money?
What about the goal he might have scored against Club B?
What if Club B then went down?
At some stage a KC is going to stand up and explain that Manchester City's sponsorship arrangements indirectly caused Norwich City to sign the wrong left-back three years later.
And somebody will invoice £6,000 for the afternoon.
By the time this is finished, the lawyers may be the only people we can prove beyond reasonable doubt benefited financially from Manchester City's alleged advantage.
Then comes another awkward question.
Who exactly are we punishing?
If executives deliberately broke the rules, punish them.
If directors knowingly participated, use whatever sanctions the regulations provide.
But Manchester City also employ hundreds of ordinary people.
Not one steward filed City's accounts.
Nobody working in the ticket office devised a sponsorship structure.
Some bloke who supported City when they were playing Macclesfield Town didn't secretly wire £50million from Abu Dhabi because he fancied seeing David Silva.
Yet sporting punishment lands on all of them.
Most obviously, it lands on the supporters.
That isn't necessarily an argument against sporting sanctions. Football clubs have always borne responsibility for the conduct of those running them.
It is simply an argument against pretending punishment can somehow deliver a scientifically calibrated dose of justice exclusively to the people responsible.
And then there are the moments.
This is where Noel Gallagher's reaction is worth considering, however partisan the source.
City supporters know what they saw.
Agüero scored.
People screamed.
People cried.
Grown men fell over seats.
Dads hugged sons.
Strangers ended up six rows away from where they'd started.
Those things happened.
You can remove Manchester City's name from a trophy.
You cannot send somebody a letter 15 years later informing them that the greatest afternoon they ever spent with their dad has retrospectively been cancelled.
And nor can you give that afternoon to somebody else.
A Manchester United supporter doesn't suddenly acquire the memory of celebrating the 2012 title because an independent commission changes a line in a record book.
Phil Jones doesn't get to go back to the Stadium of Light and rearrange his face.
We all saw it, Phil.
Sorry mate.
You can retrospectively award somebody a trophy.
You can't retrospectively give them the afternoon.
That's what makes sporting history different from a spreadsheet.
The football matches happened.
City weren't bribing opposition goalkeepers to dive over shots.
Nobody has found a suitcase full of cash underneath a referee's bed.
The finding - subject to City's challenges - concerns the financial circumstances in which City assembled and operated those teams.
That distinction doesn't make the misconduct trivial.
Far from it.
It makes the idea of retrospectively calculating the precise sporting consequence almost impossibly complicated.
Which brings us back to regulation.
Because perhaps we've welded together two entirely different questions.
How do we prevent wealthy owners destroying football clubs?
And:
How do we prevent wealthy owners transforming football clubs?
I'm passionately interested in the first.
I'm considerably less convinced we need the second.
So here's an alternative.
It may be rubbish.
I don't proclaim to have solved football finance while sitting on my sofa.
People considerably cleverer than me can find the holes.
Please do.
But if football insists on maintaining a relationship between revenue and permitted expenditure, why not establish a common competitive ceiling?
Take an agreed metric based upon the highest legitimate revenues in the Premier League.
Maybe the highest club.
Maybe an average of the top three.
Maybe a rolling multi-year calculation.
Let economists, accountants and whichever lawyers haven't yet bought islands work out the detail.
That becomes the maximum.
For everybody.
Manchester United.
Liverpool.
Tottenham.
Newcastle.
Bolton.
Barnsley.
Boston United.
If your football club organically generates enough revenue to operate at that ceiling, excellent.
Spend it.
If it doesn't, but some spectacularly wealthy lunatic develops an inexplicable lifelong passion for Preston North End and wants to spend £2billion of his fortune trying to turn Deepdale into the Bernabéu?
Why shouldn't he?
Seriously.
Why?
The Glazers don't own Preston's ambition.
Fenway Sports Group don't.
The Kroenkes don't.
Nobody owns a hereditary right to remain above Preston because their football club happened to become commercially enormous first.
But there should be one enormous condition.
You pump the money in. You lose it.
Not Preston.
You.
Equity.
Not debt loaded onto the football club.
And if your spending creates contractual liabilities the football club could never support without you, secure them.
Properly.
Want to give a footballer £300,000 a week for five years?
Fine.
But if that contract depends upon your continuing largesse, there needs to be sufficient security behind the owner-dependent liability.
You disappear tomorrow?
The guaranteed contractual liability can be met.
The player gets paid.
The player walks.
The club doesn't spend the next three years desperately searching for somebody willing to inherit an impossible wage simply to prevent insolvency.
Same with infrastructure.
Want to build a £700million stadium?
Wonderful.
Build one with heated toilet seats and a retractable cheese room if you fancy.
But any owner-dependent financing obligations capable of crippling the club if you disappear need security behind them.
Bond.
Escrow.
Guarantee.
Whatever mechanism works.
Recalculate it regularly.
Make it independently verifiable.
Make avoidance painful.
The exact engineering is for people who understand the engineering.
The principle is much simpler.
Spend what you can afford to lose, not what the club can afford to owe.
Protect the club from the owner.
Don't protect Manchester United from Bolton.
That doesn't abolish regulation.
If anything, it makes sustainability regulation more brutal.
No hiding liabilities.
No gambling the club.
No benefactor leaving behind a smoking crater and an administrator trying to flog the training-ground lawnmower.
The owner wants the upside?
The owner guarantees the downside.
Their gamble.
Their loss.
The football club survives.
And perhaps that's where the current Manchester City case eventually leaves us.
Because if the commission's findings survive the challenges ahead, City should face consequences.
The rules existed.
Their competitors were expected to follow them.
Financial information supplied to regulators has to be truthful.
A competition in which everybody privately chooses which regulations count isn't a competition.
But that shouldn't end the conversation.
It should start another one.
The Premier League began investigating City in 2018. The club was referred to an independent commission in February 2023. Years later we're still discussing appeals, sanctions and potentially further litigation.
That isn't a regulatory triumph.
It's a warning.
English football has created rules sufficiently important to determine championships, relegations and potentially the future of one of the world's largest football clubs, yet sufficiently complex that armies of lawyers can spend years arguing about their meaning and application.
And everyone now wants a simple answer.
City bad.
Premier League good.
Titles legitimate.
Titles illegitimate.
Good owner.
Bad owner.
Clean money.
Dirty money.
Justice.
Cheating.
Asterisk.
Bin.
Real life is considerably messier.
Football has spent roughly 140 years finding inventive ways for rich people to spend money trying to win football matches.
We have apparently improved matters by creating a system in which rich people can instead spend extraordinary amounts of money employing lawyers to argue about whether they were allowed to spend extraordinary amounts of money trying to win football matches.
Progress.
I don't know what the perfect financial system looks like.
I'm suspicious of anybody who says they do.
But I'd start with some fairly simple principles.
Same ceiling.
Real equity.
Secure the downside.
Owner takes the gamble.
Owner takes the loss.
Club survives.
Protect clubs from ruin.
Punish dishonesty.
Demand transparent accounts.
And then let football clubs dream.
Because if a billionaire wants to buy Preston North End, put genuine equity into it, guarantee every liability he creates and lose a colossal quantity of his own money trying to turn Preston into champions of Europe, I'm struggling to understand why the owners of Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester United or anybody else should possess a veto.
Perhaps there's a compelling answer.
Let's hear it.
But telling Preston they're perfectly entitled to become Manchester United provided they first develop Manchester United's revenues isn't competitive balance.
It's a membership policy.